I've been curious about something, and I'm basing my first playthrough on it. How many collectibles can be obtained without expanding any worlds? I'm kinda busy so I've not finished this yet, but I was wondering if anyone else had looked into this. So far, the totals in each world don't seem consistent, which seems weird, and I'm not convinced it's just because I'm bad . I had a quick google and can't seem to find any numbers on this.

Would be interesting to have an official list so people could attempt this and know what to aim for.

Can confirm that world 5 has only four available pagies. You can also get the normal ghost, the eater ghost, and the invisible ghost there before expanding. I'm currently unsure if the green one is there before expanding.

Just completed unexpanded Glitterglaze Glacier on my second playthrough. I'll start my own list here with what I find. I'm basing this off of how many collectibles you can find in an unexpanded world with only the moves you've learned in that world and previous worlds.

Nice to see some discussion here! Unfortunately, I decided it was best to expand, get everything, then check the pre-expansion totals on a new file after I knew how to get everything. However, I have the GOG version and new files are glitched until Playtonic decides to release the patch, so I have no idea when I'll be able to get my own figures for this. I would guess that there's already pretty good answers here though.